


Here is a truth (here is another truth)

by SecondStarOnTheLeft



Category: Pirates of the Caribbean (Movies), Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (2003)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, Mild Sexual Content
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-14
Updated: 2016-02-14
Packaged: 2018-05-20 07:46:28
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,012
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5997478
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SecondStarOnTheLeft/pseuds/SecondStarOnTheLeft
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Here is a truth: James Norrington loves his wife, but he is completely incapable of believing that she might return the compliment.</p>
<p>Here is another truth: Elizabeth Norrington, née Swann, is a much more patient woman than she has ever been given credit for.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Here is a truth (here is another truth)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [snowbryneich](https://archiveofourown.org/users/snowbryneich/gifts).



(Here is a truth: James Norrington is a masochist, although more in the moral sense than the  _ other _ .)

(Here is another truth: James Norrington does not hide this nearly so well as he believes he does.)

 

* * *

 

 

James never felt as loathsome as when he knocked on the door of Elizabeth’s bedroom and saw the reluctance on her lovely face before she schooled it into her usual mask of mild pleasantness.

“You need only say if you do not wish for me to share your bed,” he said, his voice sharper than he meant it to be, but how could it not be when his wife, his  _ wife,  _ did not desire him in the slightest? He had thought that in this at least he might please her, but apparently even as a lover he failed her, likely the same way he failed her in all else - simply by refusing to metamorphose into William damned Turner.

 

* * *

“I do not hate you,” she told him one morning, not looking up from the slew of invitations she was treated to every single day. Their breakfast table often felt more a war table, him with stacks of orders and requests, her with her invitations and her  _ notes _ , and they seemed as divided as rival generals, most days. “You seem to believe that I do, but you’re wrong. I’ve never hated you, James. Not even for a moment.”

“And yet you find no joy in anything of the life we are supposed to build together,” he pointed out, his voice even despite the flickering hope twisting in his gut. “Surely you can see how easy it is to read your unhappiness as dislike.”

He had never truly thought that she might hate him, but that she felt the need to give voice to such concerns gave him pause -  _ did _ she hate him, and was she simply trying to ease the tension that has choked the whole house since he turned himself away from her bed?

There was genuine distress on her lovely face, though, when he looked up from his letters, and he felt absolutely miserable for having inflicted it.

“I know that this is not what you wanted, or expected,” he said, daring to breach the gulf between them and take her hand, atop the table. Her fingers were thin and pale under his, and he felt half as if he might break them if he squeezed too hard. “And I should not expect so much from you. I know that, too.”

 

* * *

 

 

(Here is a truth: James Norrington is a very clever man.)

(Here is another truth: Elizabeth Norrington, née Swann, knows this. She also knows that he is an  _ idiot. _ )

 

* * *

She slipped under the sheets of his bed that night, wearing a heavy nightgown because of the storm-ending chill in the air, and curled under the arm he raised in sleepy confusion. 

She was still there when he woke the following morning, gown hiked up her thigh and slipped down her shoulder, and he excused himself to parse his muzzy, perplexed arousal, and to hide it from her. 

_ She is not mine,  _ he told himself, looking at the grey at his temples and in the shadow of his beard, wondering when his usual shaving mirror had been replaced by this fine, new addition.  _ She is Turner’s, and always has been, and I must not forget it. _

 

* * *

There was a party, and Elizabeth in a gown of some sort of satiny blue-white, with her hair piled high and spilling elegantly over one shoulder, and James danced with her as often as he could. She had never seemed to achingly lovely, and he was ashamed of having found her misery so enthralling now that he was seeing her once more overflowing with joy.

“You are so  _ stuffy, _ ” she teased, tipsy and hanging heavy on his arm as he eased her up the stairs to her bedroom. “But I have seen under your wig,  _ Commodore. _ I  _ know _ you.”

She leaned up on the tips of her toes and kissed- not his mouth, just the corner of his lips, soft and wetter than it ought to have been, and then she danced into her room as though it were a thing of no particular import, kicking the door shut behind her.

 

* * *

(Here is a truth: Elizabeth Norrington, née Swann, has always been terribly fond of her husband’s stuffy manner, even when it should have bothered her.)

(Here is another truth: James Norrington has always been utterly oblivious to what charms he possesses which might interest his wife, aside from his rank.)

 

* * *

“I don’t think you like me very much, James,” Elizabeth said, her legs thrown over the arm of her chair and one of her neat little shoes hanging by the toes. She looked incredibly comfortable, her day dress a soft cotton almost the same shade of yellow-gold as the wicker of the furniture on the veranda, her hair brightened by the sun and her skin darkened, and she looked almost like those peculiar statues of pagan goddesses James had seen, in troves of treasure confiscated from bloody pirates, gold and ivory and  _ beautiful _ .

“Of course I like you,” he said, offended and amused in equal measure, with  _ I love you _ hanging on the tip of his tongue, clicking against the backs of his teeth. “I should not have married you otherwise, Elizabeth.”

“Oh,  _ Commodore _ ,” she sighed, as she only did when she was teasing, and he smiled.

(She sighed  _ Oh, James,  _ once or twice, but not on the veranda, and not while edged all in sunlight and salt-air.)

 

* * *

“You,” Elizabeth said, after they had hosted a great many of their friends for dinner, and the breeze blowing in off the sea onto the veranda tasted of salt and silver, so fresh and free after the heavy stench of perfume and powdered wigs in the dining room, “are a very strange man, James Norrington.”

“And you, Elizabeth Norrington,” he returned, “cannot hold your wine.”

James was drunk, too, although not quite so much as his lovely wife, and just saying  _ Elizabeth Norrington  _ in one breath was too much for him, with the sea in his lungs and her suddenly in his arms.

“Tell me why I’m strange,” he encouraged her, dipping his head to nose along behind her ear, along the line of her neck, breathing in the powder-soft perfume dabbed behind her ear and tasting the hint of salt-sweat on her shoulder. Her skin flushed under his attentions, and he smiled when he lifted his head again. “Because I have no desire to become a pirate, perhaps?”

She frowned at that, not so drunk as to miss the jibe at Turner’s expense, and pushed herself just far enough away to meet his gaze.

“You are strange,” she said, “because for such an intelligent man, with so much skill at knowing what lies in other men’s hearts, you are so bloody  _ stupid.” _

He watched her walk away, dizzy with surprise, and wondered what it was that he had done to cause offence  _ this _ time.

 

* * *

“I do not love William Turner,” she said the following morning, the divides of their war table once more neatly drawn in lines of silverware and fine porcelain. There were shadows under her eyes, deep and darker than he liked, heralding illness more than signalling tiredness, and he wished he might offer her comfort. “I might have, once, but what lay between us was never given a chance to become anything more than… Infatuation.”

She excused herself without giving him a chance to react, disappearing in a swish of pink satin, the same colour as the flush of her neck under his lips, and James wondered when he became such a fool.

 

* * *

(Here is a truth: James Norrington has loved Elizabeth Swann, in one way or another, since the day he met her. First, he loved her for being her father’s daughter, then for her spirit, then as a sister. It was not until she was eighteen and reluctant in her role as the perfect debutante that he realised that, perhaps, he might love her as a man ought his wife.)

(Here is another truth: Elizabeth Norrington, née Swann, knows better than her husband just what the love between man and wife ought to look like, and has not been able to show him the true shape of it over the past year and a half, despite her very best efforts.)

 

* * *

Elizabeth had always admired her husband, even when she thought him cruel for wanting to see Jack dead, after all the good Jack had done. He was a good man, if a stern one, and while her heart had been in Will’s keeping at the time, she outgrew that, and has proved herself to be an excellent wife to James.

If only she could make  _ him _ see that.

James’ problem, as Elizabeth had always seen it, was that he was so  _ stubborn. _ Once he had taken an idea into his head, it was impossible to shift it, and Elizabeth knew only too well how deeply rooted the idea of her distaste for him had become, during those early days of their married life, when she had been so unsure and so  _ afraid. _

So he needed more convincing, to break through that thick, bewigged skull of his, and Elizabeth was nothing if not  _ stubborn. _

 

* * *

James’ skin was so warm that sometimes, when a storm had recently passed and the air was almost cold, Elizabeth curled against his long, firm back while he slept. He never woke, not really, and she almost always left before he rose in the morning, but during those quiet hours, when he was warm and she was cocooned there with him, it almost felt as though they might be a normal married couple.

Until, one night-

 

* * *

(Here is a truth: Elizabeth Norrington, née Swann,  _ very much enjoys _ her conjugal duties. More than is seemly, or proper, but very enthusiastically, and very sincerely.)

(Here is another truth: James Norrington also very much enjoys his conjugal duties, more than is proper even for a man with a wife as beautiful as his, but he is so deeply doubtful that he is reluctant to believe that the pleasure he finds in his wife’s bed is a mutual thing.)

 

* * *

“What are you  _ doing _ ?”

Elizabeth refused to move. She was warm, and the hair on James’ chest was soft and wirey under her hand, and she was perfectly comfortable. James didn’t move, either, instead became so perfectly still that, had it not been for his unquenchable warmth and the hammer-rush of his heart, she might have mistaken him for a model, not a man.

“Sleeping, until I was so  _ rudely _ awakened,” she groused, nosing against the divot behind his ear where he always smelled just slightly of powdered wigs and gunpowder. She knew both smells well, and wondered what it would be like to have James, in his powdered wig, stand against her back and teach her to shoot a gun, so the smell of gunpowder might be on both their hands, and then, afterwards, she could touch his warm skin, and-

“ _ Elizabeth!” _

She startled out of her sleepy considerations, as surprised as James apparently was to find that the hand she had pressed over his heart had, in fact, trailed idly over the twitching muscles of his stomach, to trace feather-light over his cock.

He blushed, when she called it that, and he never blushed otherwise, so  _ of course _ she could not call it anything else.

“If I cannot touch you like this,” she said, hiding a wicked smile against the back of his neck, with her nose tucked into his soft, short hair, “then who can, Commodore?”

She laughed as he groaned - in supplication - and rolled over, pressing her back into the pillows, and didn’t even stop when he kissed her.

 

* * *

(Here is a truth: Elizabeth Norrington, née Swann, has no more idea what love should look like than her husband does.)

(Here is another truth: finding out is an adventure she is  _ thoroughly _ enjoying.)

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Between pages (between sheets)](https://archiveofourown.org/works/7593124) by [SecondStarOnTheLeft](https://archiveofourown.org/users/SecondStarOnTheLeft/pseuds/SecondStarOnTheLeft)




End file.
